A truly mass party: The 1976 Republican Convention shows the triumphant centrist Gerald Ford over the conservative Ronald Reagan. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller, Ford's vice president, is to his right. Next to him is Ford's daughter, Susan.
The media have constructed a narrative for their campaign horse race stories, the ones all about the positioning of candidates and little about real issues. It goes something like this: The Republican "establishment," apparently represented by the likes of Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, is contending with an "insurgency" from Ted Cruz and especially Donald Trump.
Things are so dire that the idiot David Brooks, who traveled to the sprawl abortion of Verrado in the mid-2000s and saw "the future" rather than the dangerous housing bubble, to write a column (kinda) missing President Obama.
This, of course, is nonsense from a cowed national media.
The "moderate" Kasich is obsessed with a balanced budget achieved by cutting federal spending, attacking women's reproductive rights and charter schools. At least he said climate change is real — once. His ambition has him back denying mainstream science and he opposes EPA regulation of carbon emissions.
Kasich cut more than $84 million from Ohio's public schools. He removed a modest amount of state funding that had been slated for the Cincinnati streetcar and deep-sixed Ohio's plans for high-speed rail. Ohio boasted some of the finest public universities in the nation, including "public ivies" Miami University and Ohio University. Kasich threatened to "take an ax" to them if they didn't cut costs and raise tuition.
As a presidential candidate, he says he wants to keep Medicaid expansion, but favors "repealing and replacing" the rest of Obamacare (with what is murky). He wants to cut taxes and reduce union bargaining power. He wants "boots on the ground" to fight the Islamic State.
In other words, take out the bombast and some of the most embarrassing anti-immigrant language from Trump and Cruz and not much sunlight separates them and the other GOP candidates from Kasich.
There are no more moderate Republicans, much less the mass political party it once was. At the risk of violating Godwin's Law, I think of the harsh sentiment of American infantrymen such as my father who fought their way across Europe and into the Third Reich: "There are no good Germans. All the good Germans are already dead."
I know this offends some of my readers who hold onto the Republican Party of the past. But it's the reality. And the brokenness of the GOP is one of the biggest reasons why our politics are so destructive, our Cold Civil War so vicious.
The death of the GOP as a mass party began in 1964 with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, continued in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, but was really sealed in the 1994 congressional elections and the triumph of Newt Gingrich. Although Kasich was a congressman who effectively worked across the aisle until 1995, afterwards he became a top Gingrich lieutenant. After leaving Congress, he took a lucrative job at Lehman Brothers, one of the firms at the center of Wall Streets rackets and the near collapse of the world financial system.
Centrist Republicans died off or were voted out as RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — lacking ideological purity. Since then, the party has moved ever more to the right.
And no, both sides are not equally extreme. The Democrats have remained a mass party, which has proved to be a liability. But actually governing this complex republic has always depended on two mass parties.
None of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates are talking about the most pressing issues facing the nation: slowing climate change, stopping the endless wars, exposing and dismantling the deep state, getting big money out of politics, and building 21st century infrastructure. In fact, they want to perpetuate and enhance the first four.
This is why it is one of the most important elections in our history. But let's quit looking for the "moderate" Republican. Such a creature might exist among the voters — but they will vote for anything with an "R" after its name.
Really good article on how the left has moved too far to the left; could even Bill Clinton win the Democratic nomination today with it's 1992 views? Most certainly not.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-11/for-hillary-to-survive-clintonism-had-to-die?cmpid=wsdemand
From that article (read slowly; what he's really saying is that even Bill Clinton could not win today with the DNC platform of 1992-the DNC has moved too far to the left):
“Could a young Bill Clinton with his talents and his ability to think through complex issues and express his conclusions intelligently enough, could that Bill Clinton be nominated by the Democratic Party? You betcha,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who helped write Clinton’s speech laying out his “New Covenant” agenda. “Could he take the DLC platform of 1991 and sell it now? The answer is no.”
That's a brilliant analysis and I think it applies to Clinton and Reagan. They both would have evolved as our problems evolved; had they not (had their views remained "frozen"), they probably would not be electable today.
As far as the picture, well, Ford was a sitting President during the 1976 convention when challenged by Reagan. Ford won 52% to 47% so it wasn't exactly a slaughter. Ford pardoned Nixon which led to us all to discovering that Jimmy Carter had no business ever being a US President; then we had 8 years (wish we could have had more!!) of Reagan.
I still think the model is Bloomberg; fairly conservative fiscally; fairly liberal on social issues; who knows what he'd do with the military??
I agree about the sabre rattling of most of the GOP candidates (except Paul, who is now out). I just want to know how in the heck the turbo charged military so many of them envision will be paid for.
Odd that you mention Reagan in 1980 (and I guess 1984) as part of the death of the GOP as a mass party. The Gipper has two pretty significant wins (1980 and 1984) and quite honestly, pulled both Republicans and Democrats to support him. His 1984 win pulled in almost all 50 states- the country pretty clearly agreed wit his leadership.
You also mention trying to get big money out of politics (and you might vote for Hillary??). It's clearly one of Bernie's most pressing issues. But even assuming that's a noble goal, SCOTUS has spoken in Citizens United.
Why should wealth effect someone's free speech?
Posted by: INPHX | February 11, 2016 at 04:51 PM
Because a tsunami of money... oh, never mind.
Posted by: john tally | February 11, 2016 at 05:16 PM
John:
Well, let me re phrase the question.
What in the Constitution hints that wealth should effect someone's free speech?
I don't seem to recall any of the rights in the Constitution being limited based on wealth.
Can you point that out?
Oh, never mind......
Posted by: INPHX | February 11, 2016 at 05:57 PM
INPHX: Google and Bernie
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/11/google-s-next-moonshot-making-bernie-sanders-president/21311023/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl31%7Csec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D674213007
Posted by: Cal Lash | February 11, 2016 at 06:03 PM
Cal:
Thanks for the link.
FWIW, I'm no fan of big money and politics. No one can think that it doesn't influence decisions. It HAS to.
But that free speech part of the Constitution is pretty rigid, especially applied to political free speech. Like, REALLY rigid.
So, Google (and unions) can do what they wants with their money.
And so can the Koch brothers.
Posted by: INPHX | February 11, 2016 at 06:10 PM
There's really nothing "rigid" in the Constitution, it was crafted with enough ambivalence and nuance to allow it to evolve as conditions change. The framers probably didn't know there would be an army of literalists invoking their interpretation of something as the only correct one possible. If they suddenly appeared here, hale and hearty, they'd probably be distressed to see how the Constitution has been used so frequently to impede progress. They'd be really happy and excited about electricity, indoor plumbing, and reality tv, but eventually they'd get around to looking outside.
Posted by: Pat | February 11, 2016 at 06:43 PM
I disagree on Citizens United decision.
But may the best $$$ win. My money's on the millennial's.
GO BERNIE
Posted by: Cal lash | February 11, 2016 at 06:46 PM
Ambiguous is the word my fossilizing brain was searching for, not ambivalent.
Posted by: Pat | February 11, 2016 at 08:00 PM
Pat:
I don't know if you're right or not about the Founders being distressed about the Constitution impeding progress; that's really hard to say. I'm pretty sure they could not have envisioned what this country turned into.
But none of that's the point.
What we do know is that there are express rules to change, or amend, the Constitution. And my sense is that's what they'd say. Want to restrict free political speech based on money? Fine.
Amend the Constitution.
Posted by: INPHX | February 12, 2016 at 09:59 AM
David Brooks' ego blinds his brain to the fact that the term "moderate Republican" is an oxymoron. As for Kasich, he is just Scott Walker with better marketing.
Posted by: Mary Tooley | February 12, 2016 at 10:53 AM
The One percent route to Hell for the 99 percent.
"One can tell who is going to heaven based on the accumulation of wealth. "
Bernie is the only 99 percenter in the race.
Inphx, I agree we should change the Constitution.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 12, 2016 at 11:43 AM
Well some of he Republican mainstream are in jail in Oregon. Time to get thier livestock off my land. Roundup thier cattle and auction them off for monies owed for grazing on MY land.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 12, 2016 at 12:29 PM
The DLC wouldn't win today because the Rainbow Coalition was a generation ahead of its time. It's not like the political success of Clintonism ameliorated the concerns of its contemporary social and economically liberal critics. It just brushed them aside in an embrace of trade.
Were LGBT communities were satisfied with DADT or DOMA? That's not equality. Or did black Americans stop worrying about over-policing? Or did wage stagnation end? Clintonism never ameliorated those concerns. Occupy never really went away, you know? It was just chilled by state oppression and Obama worship.
"In a single debate last week, Hillary Clinton affirmed her opposition to every major multilateral trade pact of the last the last quarter-century, volunteered concern for the politics of racial and sexual identity, and implied she might be pleased to see the U.S. Supreme Court again ban capital punishments by states."
Perhaps "broken windows" policing saved New York, but now people get killed while selling loose cigarettes on the street. And considering where we all started, with people a generation ago complaining about police brutality, maybe that's why centrism died--because liberals can no longer pretend like it meets their demands?
I gotta say though: I don't understand the shift to the social far-right. I am equally concerned about spending within our means--I don't want to see more Flint's. But the inability of the right to contend with the excesses of the previous two decades of political activity (both socially and economically) boggles the mind. We have evidence that state officials murder unarmed citizens without just cause and the response is... blue lives matter? Or that climate change can end the world and, instead of a "free-market response," the answer is to deny it happens? That's just... a detachment from reality which is frightening. Clintonism can't survive because liberals don't want to pay it's costs any longer. I'm wondering when people will come to the same conclusion with neoliberalism.
Posted by: #theintellectualassassin | February 12, 2016 at 12:35 PM
Good post assassin. The above Front Pages by Bloomberg backs your comments. Hillary at the most will be a "moderate" A rich moderate. But will she be accepted by the one percenters that continue to game her. Or is she gaming them. I can't tell who she is gaming, maybe us all.
When it's all said and drone and Hillary the Hawk is installed as the first female president. I want to sit down to coffee with Bernie Sanders and Jose Mujica and asking if they were "kidding"?
Posted by: Cal lash | February 12, 2016 at 01:12 PM
Well "Mainstream Republicans" (privatize the Grand Canyon ) profiteers are once again going to be upset as Obama just declared a huge part of the California Desert a part of the National Park system. I have been encouraging him to make Arizona a Roadless Wilderness. Historians may some day compare him to Republicans Tricky Dick an T.R.
Hopefully he will create more Wilderness and move DEA work to the FDA.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 12, 2016 at 03:30 PM
INPHX, it doesn't require an amendment, it just requires that a relevant case be heard by a different Supreme Court. Money as speech only became a thing because of Santa Clara County Vs. Southern Pacific railroad (I think it was SP) in which the federal district court reporter, who was a former vice president of a railroad, inserted his own take into the court's decision, and it was never changed.
Posted by: Pat | February 12, 2016 at 05:38 PM
I had to go look at it again, it's been awhile, but it was actually heard in the Supreme Court, and was the first case-I suppose-that gave corporations personhood.
Posted by: Pat | February 12, 2016 at 05:42 PM
Jon, you write, "...And no, both sides are not equally extreme..." Of course you would write that--you're liberal!
I don't take issue with many of the points you make, but until liberals can get past this conceit that you're "really moderate" and it's only the Republicans who have become more extreme, nothing will change.
The system is broken. Both "greed" on the part of some on the right, and "envy" on the part of some on the left (both sides of the same sin) are to blame.
As you suggest, "big money in politics" is partially to blame, but so is the moral relativism ("political correctness") and the ridicule and trivialization of America's Judeo-Christian underpinnings imposed on us by the left.
The right will never accept immigration reform until the left admits that assimilation--not immigration--is the real problem.
Race will be an issue so long as the left insists on making it an issue. If the Democrat Party is a "mass" party, it is only because it has assembled a coalition of "victims" (based on race, religion, sexuality, gender, etc.) to whom it shamelessly panders--all the while trivializing and demonizing the American traditions that represent what we have in common. As Morgan Freeman suggests, we should quit talking about race. At the same time, we should genuinely strive to treat all equally--not favor, or pander to, any specific cohort of people.
Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Goldwater and Reagan, might be uncomfortable with today's Republicans, but Truman, Johnson, and Kennedy would be just as uncomfortable with today's Democrats. Moreover, the rank and file of both parties are likely less "extreme" than the leadership. Open primaries and other techniques that would have the effect of reducing the influence of the current party leaderships should be enacted.
Posted by: Robert H. Bohannan | February 13, 2016 at 01:58 PM
Good post Robert
Vote for Bernie so he gets to pick next two Supreme court justices.
Posted by: calash | February 13, 2016 at 03:41 PM
Horrible news:
Antonin Scalia has died.....
Here we go.......
Posted by: INPHX | February 13, 2016 at 04:20 PM
Horrible for you, horrible for Antonin, not so much for lots of us.
Keep telling yourself that's envy you see on the left, Mr. Bohannon, instead of anger. Are the Trumpkins also consumed with envy?
Posted by: Pat | February 13, 2016 at 04:32 PM
"Ridicule and trivialization of America's Judeo-Christian underpinings..." More like karma. You reap what you sow. Right-wing "Christians" brought this on themselves.
Posted by: Diane D"Angelo | February 13, 2016 at 04:50 PM
Possible that Antonin may have earned a chair and robe in Dante's Inferno. This century is going to be the Monster of all human existence. Coming soon the M and M wars. Then Man vs Machine. Then the Cave dwellers in Afghanistan start a renewed population on the recently denuded planet, earth.
PS if you only have a left wing or only a right wing you are like a headless chicken spinning in only one direction until you spin out of orbit and crash and get consumed by the big bird with two equal wings.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 13, 2016 at 06:50 PM
Electing Hillary is electing the wrong woman at the wrong time.
Vote Bernie and then Elizabeth Warren
Posted by: Cal lash | February 14, 2016 at 12:12 AM
OT...
Just about when I think this women has something to say she exposes her blind side. Bernie is in if he keeps catching her prep-school naivete. Despite all the establishment connections Hillary has with the long Clinton legacy, she's batting zero on agriculture.
Bill was almost spoon-fed industrial agriculture through chemical-dependent corporations like Tyson Chicken in Arkansas. Hillary has been romanced from day one by demagogic pro-chemical agricultural corporations like Monsanto. Billionaires like Bill Gates raise the technocratic ante. It's all still the hyperbole of "a better world through chemistry."
GMOs in food and farming are really still the agricultural chemical people and like the fossil fuel energy fix people, they have made politicians wealthy while they've kept the world in war. Hillary's rhetoric is all bunk folks.
Those of us in the trenches in the war zones: in the fields of the Great Lakes Grain Belt, across the Great Plains, in the California Fruit Basket, and elsewhere in farming -- all the genuine people still trying to hang on to organic farming and the independent small family farmer -- know Hillary is entirely out to lunch.
Absolutely nothing in Hillary Clinton's protected upbringing brings her close to food and farming realities. No one I can think of looks more ridiculous sitting on a tractor. So -- She's been brainwashed by the money men, the prime evil doers -- naturally, they are the ones who funded her husband's early governor bid in Arkansas.
Her standing with Monsanto alone discounts everything else she is trying to say as far as I'm concerned. Monsanto saw her in the running for the 2016 election and cozied up to her some time back (so did Gates). Jerry Crawford, former Monsanto lobbyist became her campaign adviser in Iowa and both DOW and Monsanto have contributed to the Clinton Foundation. The high-tech corporate agricultural promoters have pumped her with their "feed the world" propaganda which is really all about capturing the food markets and increasing corporate profits. Remember, many of the richest men in the world associated with food and energy (and computer technology) live in gated compounds separate from the rest of us and the lowest farmers (peasants of the world) are almost entirely unknown to them.
Hillary sits here with a smirk on her face as if she knows completely GMOs are right for the people of the world when in fact she's completely out of touch with the real suffering many of us have experienced. But we know food reality beyond her rhetorical establishment ignorance. We know! And we're both hard working dedicated "ecologically correct" family farmers in the fields that haven't had the resources to go to collage (although many are now) and PhD people like myself who've studied the real biology and ecology of agriculture all our lifetimes. To us, Hillary Clinton, backed by Gates and Monsanto, speaking for GMOs, is a total BS-er (to use a down home expression).
Again, what amazes me about the Clinton's blind side is its source. I can assume there is some compensation for insecurity with Bill in his troubled upbringing in Arkansas -- both can act very arrogant in their beliefs. And too often, they've been stubbornly "wrong." Hillary's backing of GMOs and Monsanto is one such time - Really!
http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/02/08/video-hillary-clinton-talks-about-her-plan-to-get-people-to-accept-gmos/
Posted by: Ken Kailing | February 14, 2016 at 03:43 PM
INPHX, Scalia's death has me concerned indeed. But, I also understand that a liberal might be hopeful about filling that vacancy with someone more to their liking.
It could be argued that Scalia's death is nearly as important as the election of the next President, particularly for those who are socially conservative. Could it possibly be more so? Potentially.
Unfortunately in our system of gridlock and federal overreach, so many political issues ended up getting punted over to the Supreme Court. I guess this is one consequence of our incapable Congress...it seems like so many things of import end up having to get validated or rejected by the SC, the ultimate political arbiters.
That said, despite the politicization of the appointment process, at least once on the bench the justices seem to enjoy intellectual freedom. I have at least some respect for all the jurists, which is more than many of us can probably say for the other branches of government, so maybe it's not so bad. I just hope that America in the 21st century can find a way to be a land of religious freedom and tolerance of all faiths or lack thereof.
To me, the foundation of our democracy, to the core, is every person's right to free speech, free assembly and free worship. As long as we protect every citizen's voice and vote, then I feel relatively safe and secure in my family's future as American citizens.
Posted by: Mark in Scottsdale | February 15, 2016 at 08:14 AM
Mark, as a militant agnostic I have for about 50 plus years harbored doubt about the wisdom of providing a tax free basis and safe haven for the most evil forces on the planet. "ORGANIZED RELIGION.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 15, 2016 at 12:20 PM
When news broke Saturday that Antonin Scalia had been found dead that morning, it was later revealed that he had requested his body be cremated. Yet, in a twist of irony, millions of women -- whom Scalia argued should never be allowed the right to have an abortion, should they choose to do so -- met over the weekend to decide whether Scalia has the right to do what he wants with his own body. According to one woman who agreed to speak about the meeting on the condition that she not be identified, the gathering of women are leaning toward denying Scalia the right to choose because "his body no longer has a soul. Thus, it cannot choose what it wants to do with itself."
Posted by: ChrisInDenver | February 15, 2016 at 12:59 PM
Religion and Nationalism are just the flip side of the same coin. Both are methods of control. ABSOLUTE CONTROL is the goal if both.
Posted by: Cal lash | February 16, 2016 at 06:36 PM